Hard Drive Upgrade For My Mini Mac, Internal or external hard drive for my mini mac Options

[fatsuma]

Hello

Can you help. I bought a Mini Mac 1.42GHZ (not Intel) to run Ableton Live.

All was fine, until recently I began running 6 tracks simultaneously and I started getting sound drop outs.
The 'D' in the top right hand corner flashes to show that the mac's pathetic 4200rpm hard drive can't keep up. (apple don't seem to advertise there hard drive speeds in their specs)

Do I ...

a) replace the internal with a 7200rpm drive. And if so, any suggestions or what make and model. Will I get significant speed/ track leaps, avoiding drop outs.

b) Use an external Firewire drive and if so how do I set this up. Do I...

put the application (Live) and the project file on the internal hard drive and
put the samples on the external.

or

does the project file also go on the external drive along with the samples.

Many thanks for any help or assistance you can help me with.

Fatsuma

[lepetitmartien]

Hey

Well, keep the internal for system, apps and non audio files and have a firewire drive for Audio only. The system drive must cope with the calls for the system, the swap files, the apps, when adding the audio, it's just too much. Now it's sufficient just for these save the audio files you have to stream/write and treat.

Never ever think of moving the apps themselves elsewhere than the App folder on your system drive, usually you can do so but it may end up in upgrade hells and nightmares. So just leave your computer as it is and add an external drive (cheap upgrade). You'll have some tracks more before the hiccups.

[fatsuma]

Thanks

So to clarify...

Internal = runs the Ableton project
external = contains all the samples

Does it have to be firewire or will USB 2.0 be the same speed?

Any idea how many track I should be able to run on Mini Mac 1.42GHZ, 512 RAM with 80gb internal and then adding external drive.

Currently I can only run about 6 tracks and then the 'D' flashes and drop out occurs. The CPU still has lots of life left in it though.

Thanks again.

fatsuma

[lepetitmartien]

The drop out is usually AFAIK a little bit higher in tracks, but it's a 4200 rpm drive, and you have only 512 MB of RAM, maxing out will help a little too.

Firewire is better than USB 2 (even if USB 2 is better on paper) as Firewire handles file streaming and time constraints way better. Note, USB 2 will work, in case you can't find a FW drive. The difference will show more with 30+tracks, at the same tie, which won't be the case here anyway.

For the actual number of tracks, I don't know, it was 8 on the internal drive in 2002 with a very unoptimized app… that was a long time ago…